How an 800-Employee Enterprise Cut Communication Costs by 62%
62% reduction in communication costs
About this case study: results are from a real Salamtalk deployment. The customer’s name is a pseudonym and their logo is withheld under a confidentiality agreement. The metrics below are reported as measured.
The situation
A digital services group ran 800 employees across 12 offices, each with its own on-premise PBX. Every site had been bought separately over a decade, so the estate spanned three vendors and several firmware generations.
Three problems compounded:
- Maintenance contracts per site. Each PBX carried its own support agreement, and several had moved to extended-support pricing as the hardware aged.
- No unified dial plan. Calling a colleague in another office meant dialling an external number. There was no company-wide extension range.
- Inconsistent call data. Each system exported its own call records in its own format, so group-level reporting was assembled by hand.
What they needed
The brief was specific: one platform, one dial plan, no downtime during business hours, and all existing main numbers retained.
The retained-numbers requirement mattered most. Several offices had published the same numbers for over fifteen years across printed material and directory listings.
What we deployed
| Requirement | Implementation |
|---|---|
| Unified dial plan | Single 4-digit extension range across all 12 sites |
| Number retention | Free porting of all main and direct-dial numbers |
| Handsets | Existing SIP phones re-provisioned where compatible |
| Resilience | Geo-redundant routing, 99.9% uptime SLA |
| Encryption | TLS 1.3 signalling, SRTP media |
| Reporting | Group-wide call analytics from one dashboard |
How the migration ran
The cutover ran site by site, in parallel with the existing PBXs rather than as a single switch.
- Audit of extensions, call flows and IVR menus at each site.
- Cloud platform provisioned alongside the live PBX estate.
- One office piloted on new numbers for two weeks.
- Main numbers ported site by site, oldest estate first.
- PBXs decommissioned after a 30-day quiet period.
Because both systems ran concurrently, each site had a working fallback until its PBX was switched off. Total elapsed time was under three weeks to the final port.
The results
- 62% reduction in total communication costs
- $420K in annual hardware maintenance removed
- 12 sites to one platform, with a single company-wide extension range
- Group-level call reporting available without manual consolidation
The cost reduction came primarily from retiring per-site maintenance contracts and the hardware refresh that two of the older systems were due. Per-minute call rates were a smaller contributor.
What was harder than expected
Porting timelines were the long pole. Port completion is controlled by the losing carrier, not the gaining one, and two sites had numbers held by a reseller that required additional authorization. Planning assumed the carrier would move faster than it did.
Not every handset could be reused. Standard SIP phones were re-provisioned, but one site’s proprietary digital handsets were tied to its PBX vendor and had to be replaced.
If we ran it again, we would start the port authorization paperwork two weeks earlier.
Next steps: see business VoIP for the platform, enterprise communications for multi-site deployments, or talk to our team about a migration plan.